Water Reminder (my first StickyBits app)

When I registered last week at SXSW, the most intriguing item I found in the customary goodie bag o’ shwag I was given was a postcard from a startup called StickyBits attached to a stack of barcode stickers.

Bar code scanning and object hyperlinking aren’t new ideas. Just as microblogging wasn’t by any measure a new idea when Twitter was created. But what instantly intrigued me about StickyBits was that like products such as Twitter that have successfully crossed the chasm to mainstream adoption, StickyBits isn’t pitching features. It’s pitching an easy way to “tag your world” with a playful and inspired design.

In fact, one of the few flat-out complaints I have about the simple StickyBits app in the Android Marketplace is the unfortunately phrased “you have no friends” message that is presumably shown to all new users:

(Hint: never tell your users that they don’t have any friends!)

Twitter for the Real World

Just like Twitter was able to blossom from a simple app asking “what are you doing?” into a massive coral reef of users and use-cases, StickyBits has the potential to become the Twitter for the real-world, allowing us to add discussion, insight, analytics, and incentives to our interaction with a broad assortment of real objects.

But the Twitter comparison will only go so far, since apps that help us interface with the real-world are much more than analogues to their purely digital counterparts. Search engines for barcode content are bound to have some unique traits, as are social networking functionality for barcodes. When designing these apps, we might be able to take some cues from Tokyo’s barcode-savvy culture or draw from known UX best practices, but there’s bound to be many competing and complementary ideas and approaches. I’m fairly sure that there are a number of killer apps for barcodes that will challenge our intuitions and expectations, and that’s what should make the StickyBits developer community a fun, rewarding place to be.

Water Reminder

On several occasions during this year’s SXSW Music Festival, I saw concert-goers collapsing from dehydration. By Friday, bands were reminding their audiences to drink plenty of water.

On my plane ride back to the Bay Area, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to build a “water reminder” that could serve as a minimum viable product for a health-activity service built on StickyBits. The health-activity market is quickly growing, led by the success of Nike+ and the “Calorie Tracker” niche of mobile apps. Most purchased food and beverage products have barcodes, and you could perhaps barcode your containers for whole and bulk foods, making StickyBits an appealing platform for nutrition-tracking services. After all, if you can tell when someone sleeps by analyzing their tweeting patterns, you can probably infer a great deal more information by analyzing your nutritional consumption patterns.

The Water Reminder is a mobile-device compatible webapp with the simple utility of reminding you to drink water. Call the Water Reminder hotline (provided courtesy of Twilio), and choose the number of days you’d like to subscribe to the Water Reminder. From the hours of 11am-6pm, if you don’t scan a purchased or refilled bottle of water for more than two hours, an SMS message is sent reminding you to get a drink of water. If an additional half hour passes without a water check-in, you’re sent a phone-call reminder.

• Visit Water Reminder
• View the Water Reminder Source Code on Github

Water Reminder was mostly written at 30,000 ft. and needs to be integrated with the still-unreleased StickyBits API. But it seems to be working pretty well after just a couple hours of work, and the core application functionality is implemented in just over 100 lines of code.

Here’s the main view for incoming calls:

(see the Twilio documentation for details on the request arguments)

My first attempt at scheduling checks for subscribers via App Engine’s Task Queues was ridiculously inefficient. The solution for my predicament was the task object’s “eta” property, allowing the task creator to specify an absolute time for a task to be executed.

How I’d Like to Improve the Water Reminder

Here is my list of ponies for Water Reminder:

• Scan your other drinks (a sports drink, a coffee, etc.) to re-calibrate your expected current hydration level.
• Instead of subscribing for a set number of days, users can configure a temperature threshold. For example, the Water Reminder could be configured to activate on days where the user’s location exceeds a local temperature of 90 degrees.
• Access to the right StickyBits API endpoints. I think it’s only a matter of weeks (or days?) until a limited API is made available, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the first API release will make it relatively easy to disambiguate product information from a commercial barcode so that I can easily tell which barcode scans are associated with bottles of water.
• Leverage the ability to share and view comments and multimedia attached to barcodes. I’ve thought of some gimmicky uses of this feature, such as adding a promo for charity:water. An integration of comments should ideally enhance the app’s core functionality of helping people stay hydrated.

The Water Reminder concept doesn’t do a great job of taking advantage of the content-attaching component of StickyBits, so once I have access to the API I plan on making a few more open-source apps demonstrating the range of uses for the StickyBits platform.

Do you have any other ideas for how I could enhance Water Reminder, or suggestions for StickyBits apps I could work on? Leave ‘em in the comments!

StalkBox Wins a Droid at the SXSW Google Hackathon

StalkBox, my Startup Bus project with @broadcrawford, was a featured project at the SXSW Google Hackathon. The idea was simple enough, and relevant to the VIP-filled SXSW environment: real-time celebrity maps. If there’s a half dozen parties to choose from, see where the celebs are going to be before you make your choice.

I guess the Google judges liked our simple pitch, because we won a Droid!

Jesse Schell Describes The Future of Games

School is a game, right? You go, you get scores. You come out, there’s a leaderboard.

He (Lee Sheldon) doesn’t give out grades for each assignment. He gives out experience points. And you level up through the class. So class attendance is up. Class participation is up. Homework is turned in better. Because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.

— via fury.com

Thoughts on RightSide Capital

MobileCrunch reports that David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee are starting RightSide Capital, a new seed-stage fund that will make 100-200 investments per year

Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.

I have mixed feelings about whether or not RightSide has a good model. On one hand, I do somewhat agree with the HN commenter who wants “our capital markets to look more like our mortgage markets: you get your history read by a computer, numbers get crunched, and you get a take-it-or-leave-it offer presented to you by a junior employee of the firm.” Or at the very least, our capital markets could look like this at the most accessible, lowest-common-denominator stage. And for millions of people, this would be wonderful.

But for those of us really trying to change the world, what we need most is time with experienced mentors, and not just a little bit of cash. If RightSide can find a way to scale mentoring to a few hundred founders per year without sacrificing quality, they really could shake up the angel market.

I’ll be eager to see whether they can do it.

One Person Profitable

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder

— Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup

What Is One Person Profitable?

There’s a lot of single founders out there, and an increasing number of them are managing to get their startups or micro-ISVs ramen profitable while maintaining 100% equity and incurring no debt. I’ve picked up the habit of calling this milestone “One Person Profitable”.

I’ve found the origin story of Admobs to be a particularly inspiring example of how a one-person shop was funded by Sequoia, quickly grew, and was recently acquired by Google. I’ve also found that there are plenty of Hacker News readers who have successfully bootstrapped as a single founder.

Ramen profitability is always a milestone, but it’s another thing altogether if you can achieve One Person Profitable. If someone has pulled it off, I want to see it on their resume or bio in clear, unambiguous terms. In fact, if you’re building webapps or mobile apps and you have the technical chops to do all the development yourself, there’s usually no reason why you can’t reach profitability as a single founder.

The Multiple Founder Arguments

So why are incubators implicitly or explicitly requiring teams to have multiple founders? Here are two main arguments that come to mind:

• There’s Too Much Work (or Moral Weight) For One Person

This is the most easily debunked argument. If developing an MVP for your startup idea is too much work for one person, maybe you’re just doing it wrong. I still remember the amazement I had while sharing an office with Disqus at how their two-person co-founder team managed to be incredibly productive by making quick decisions and being able to frequently say “no”. Even just one of them could probably pull off ramen profitability as a single founder.

Of course Disqus, Tumblr, and all the other successful two-people startups out there have all had the added benefit of a two-person labor division. But like Paul Graham says, the most important role of your co-founder is to help you navigate through the rough patches. The moral weight has proven time and time again to be too much for one person.

My only rebuttal to this is that the faster you can become one person profitable, the less likely you are to feel the full pressure of being a single-founder. If you reach one person profitability and then bring on four co-founders the next week, you’ve still achieved the one person profitable milestone.

• Your Co-Founders Are Your Biggest Investors

This argument can’t be debunked because it’s true that having solid co-founders and advisors is always a positive indicator. Co-founders and early employees make the biggest investment of any stakeholder, and if you can’t sell your vision to co-founders or employees, then how are you going to be able to sell to customers and follow-up investors?

Conclusion

I find the co-founder as investor argument somewhat troubling only when I consider that investors have no reason to encourage you to reach ramen profitability as a single-founder. You’re more prone to failing or selling at an “acquhire” price, while startups that are five-founders deep at launch time can’t usually be successful unless they’re the type of huge success that investors desire.

Single founders tend to end up with a lot more control of their venture once it does become successful. And control, from what I understand, tends to be the most valuable asset to founders who really care about their ventures. Owning all your equity is just about as pro-founder as it gets, and while good seed-stage investors and incubators are pro-founder, I’m not so sure they are pro-founder enough to enthusiastically support the One Person Profitable approach.

I think it’ll be worthwhile to explore the idea of One Person Profitable further. If we really want entrepreneurship to be as accessible as more traditional career choices, I think it makes sense that there should be at least one decent resource advocating the advantages of being a single founder.

The E-Book Pricing War Heats Up

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer. Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore. From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler. From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

— via antipope.org

The e-book pricing conflict has been around for a while, but it has now reached an unprecedented intensity. This is an issue that, like the Google Books settlement, could actually have fairly wide-reaching consequences. Let’s say that the publishers just aren’t willing to budge, but Amazon and Apple still want a way to maintain acceptable margins on book sales. The result might resemble the unfortunate “minimum advertised pricing” rules that end up making shoppers have to jump through hoops in order to view how much an item will cost.

But ebook shoppers would refuse to support such annoyances. Maybe I’ll put a $300 digital camera in my shopping cart so I can see if I get 10% or 15% off retail price, but for a book with a hardcover price of $15? Fuggedaboutit.

I bet there are some more creative, innovation solutions here to please the publishers, vendors, shoppers, and even the authors. And I’m sure the publishers may need some help to come up with them.

How about opening up the playing field by offering your inventory via a flexible digital content affiliate platform? Even with the agency model - especially with the agency model - let the developers run wild with this stuff, and come up with 1,000 new ideas that will rejuvenate the publishing industry. After all, wouldn’t it be a shame to waste this perfect storm of an opportunity?